dieseltaylor Posted March 17, 2009 Share Posted March 17, 2009 It is very hard to credit this - but then in this short term age lots of stupid decisions are left to and made by people who are looking for a new job every couple of years. And when the **** hits the fan they are long gone. Americans forget how to make their missiles Plans to refurbish US Trident missiles have been put on hold because American scientists have forgotten how to make part of the warhead. The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is reported to have forgotten how to make Fogbank, a very hazardous material used in Trident warheads. This has resulted in the warhead refurbishment programme being put back a year at the cost of $69 million. Not only does it cause trouble for the Americans, but it may also cause problems for the British, who use similar technology. Fogbank in the warheads of British Trident missiles also needs to be replaced. While neither the Ministry of Defence of the NNSA would say anything about the function or nature of Fogbank, it is believed to be a foam used between the fission and fusion stages of a thermonuclear bomb. When being made, it needs a solvent cleaning agent described as being "extremely flammable" and "explosive". "Toxic materials" are used in the process, which are dangerous to work with. Other problems involved in the making of Fogbank include the production of a new facility in Tennessee after the old one had been demolished in the 1990s, and now the loss of information vital to the making of Fogbank itself. A report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which reports to the US Congress, said that: "NNSA did not effectively manage one of the highest risks of the programme - the manufacture of a key material known as Fogbank - resulting in $69m in cost over-runs and a schedule delay of at least one year that presented significant logistical challenges for the navy." The GAO also attacked the NNSA of an inconsistent approach to costing the programme. The grand total was $2.1 billion in 2004, $6.2bn in 2005 and $2.7bn in 2006. NNSA's principal deputy administrator, William Ostendorff, said that NNSA is strengthening its management procedures. John Ainslie, co-ordinator of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, described the incident as, "like James Bond destroying his instructions as soon as he has read them." Story from the Sunday Herald 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mike_the_wino Posted March 17, 2009 Share Posted March 17, 2009 That is some funny sh*t there. I am constantly amazed at how little information is retained within a company in a format that is readily available to all. One of my mandated goals over the last year has been to map our process, complete with source documents to explain why certain steps are taken at specific times, alternative courses of action, and visual timeline so that even a monkey could follow it. With all of the technology around us, we have reverted back to an oral history when it comes to a corporate environment. Try to find a documented foundation for most company policies, or ways of doing things, and you will come up lacking. And this isn't the first time I have had to do this. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lars Posted March 17, 2009 Share Posted March 17, 2009 John Ainslie, co-ordinator of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, described the incident as, "like James Bond destroying his instructions as soon as he has read them." Er, think this guy would be jumping up and down for joy about it. Can't even understand why they went and asked his opinion. New plant has already been built, btw, and they are pumping the stuff out. Maybe we should just tell the John Ainsles of the world to go get stuffed so we don't have to pay to rebuild it a third time. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dieseltaylor Posted March 17, 2009 Author Share Posted March 17, 2009 Lars. You really know how to get to the nub of a story : ) Mike - one of the reasons so many organisations thought they ought to go to an industry standard formats for office type files. Whilst M$ may want to change them unilaterally to make more bucks after a couple more decades early stuff might be unreadable. Hence Open Office. Why anyone could think it advisable to keep important stuff in proprietary formats is beyond me if a better alternative exists. But I know what you mean about physical stuff being thoughtlessly trashed because no one has the sense to see it has value possibly now to another company. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Emrys Posted March 17, 2009 Share Posted March 17, 2009 But I know what you mean about physical stuff being thoughtlessly trashed because no one has the sense to see it has value possibly now to another company. Reminds me of the way my mom used to toss out my favorite books when she was on one of her cleaning binges. Some of those would be collector's items now, worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars. I think she did it just to be mean. Michael 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Emrys Posted March 17, 2009 Share Posted March 17, 2009 ...it has value possibly now to another company. But regarding the present discussion, I wonder if part of the reason that material was destroyed was to keep it from falling into the hands of "another company". Normal industrial espionage aside, there is also the old fashioned kind and I doubt that anyone at NNSA is eager to help any foreign powers not allied to us make better ballistic missiles. Michael 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gunnergoz Posted March 17, 2009 Share Posted March 17, 2009 Maybe that's how the Greeks forgot how to make Greek Fire... Seriously, this sort of thing makes one understand how freaking out of control much of the military-industrial complex is. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing is only part of it...the left hand forgot it was busy wanking and the right is busy signing off a new anti-wanking bill. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
costard Posted March 17, 2009 Share Posted March 17, 2009 But regarding the present discussion, I wonder if part of the reason that material was destroyed was to keep it from falling into the hands of "another company". Normal industrial espionage aside, there is also the old fashioned kind and I doubt that anyone at NNSA is eager to help any foreign powers not allied to us make better ballistic missiles. Michael Good call - but the cynic would point out that the developer of the process is unlikely to get any royalties from the patent, so is more likely to be consulted (and paid) for the re-development. @ gunnergoz - not just the military. The banking industry is now sitting in their costly pile of turds, telling each other in wondering tones, "Oh, so THAT's why you don't do the things we were taught not to do at school." 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hoolaman Posted March 18, 2009 Share Posted March 18, 2009 Maybe that's how the Greeks forgot how to make Greek Fire... Seriously, this sort of thing makes one understand how freaking out of control much of the military-industrial complex is. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing is only part of it...the left hand forgot it was busy wanking and the right is busy signing off a new anti-wanking bill. And people accuse these guys of conspiring to do X or Y grand conspiracy. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Emrys Posted March 18, 2009 Share Posted March 18, 2009 The banking industry is now sitting in their costly pile of turds, telling each other in wondering tones, "Oh, so THAT's why you don't do the things we were taught not to do at school." I always felt that the "be here now" and "live for the day" philosophies got taken the wrong way. The smooth functioning of society requires a good deal of institutional memory, and it seems like we as a society have been neglecting ours (where we are not systematically destroying it) for the last four decades. It is almost amusing to note the regularity with which people build expensive homes in mud slide zones and are then amazed and outraged when those get swept away. The list goes on... Michael 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PD Posted March 22, 2009 Share Posted March 22, 2009 I also think that when it comes to 'disposable' and mobile labour, people tend to store their knowledge, rather than disseminate it. Perhaps the people involved in the original fabrication of the material were expecting to be retained at a later date to manufacture replacements. Another issue is information storage. The original specs and processes might be stored on an outdate storage media, or use software designed to run on a dead operating system. This kind of issue is becoming more prevalent, as I'm now involved in a project (very tiny) that rotted for four years, and the same hardware is no longer available, the linux distro died years ago and storage media like Flashdrives have come along in leaps and bounds. It'd be interesting to see just where the fabrication process broke down. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Kettler Posted March 27, 2009 Share Posted March 27, 2009 Having spent over eleven years in military aerospace myself, before moving on to other things, perhaps I can provide some perspective. At least in the case of documents, classified information retention is tied to contracts requiring same. If you lose the original contract and wish to keep documents associated with that one, you have to convince the program office on some other surviving classified contract to let you move the documents there. If not, your only choices are destruction or return them to the government. This is not all that big an issue if the firm has lots of smaller contracts, but you should see the chaos that ensues when there are only a few big ones and one disappears. Rockwell went through just such a drill when the B-1B primary contract ended, resulting in a huge loss to the classified knowledge base. This is bad enough, but combine that with corporate policies that put two green relatively inexpensive engineers where there was once one wise old senior engineer, and you begin to see how key knowledge is lost. One way the firms I used to work for dealt with the problem was to hire retired key personnel as consultants, since they were in an entirely different accounting category that way, rather than on the main payroll. Naturally, the ongoing loss of corporate memory is exacerbated by the march of information storage technology and the consequent endless changes in data storage formats and gear, not to mention skilled personnel to run legacy gear and programs. NASA, for example, has tons of practically unreadable space data. The Fogbank story may make entertaining reading, but there are real problems behind it, potentially crippling ones. Regards, John Kettler 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gunnergoz Posted March 27, 2009 Share Posted March 27, 2009 Thanks, John - very illuminating. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Emrys Posted March 27, 2009 Share Posted March 27, 2009 Yeah, that's in line with what I've been reading (some of it between the lines) for several years now. Michael 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Kettler Posted March 28, 2009 Share Posted March 28, 2009 gunnergoz and Michael Emrys, You're welcome! Neglected to explain that when you try to move classified documents to another contract, you'd better be able to make a solid case as to relevance to the receiving program. Otherwise, you'll immediately get the brush off. Forgot also to mention the well-established government practice of destroying jigs, docs and key support equipment when a contract ends. See, for example, what happened with the YB-49 and the Saturn V. Regards, John Kettler 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gunnergoz Posted March 28, 2009 Share Posted March 28, 2009 If they're firkin' government-paid programs or systems, the firkin' docs and formulas should go to some government warehousing program for just such an eventuality. And I don't mean Indiana Jone's warehouse... But then, that would be too g.d. logical for the US government, wouldn't it? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
costard Posted March 28, 2009 Share Posted March 28, 2009 Yeah, but there's only so much warehousing you can do before you run out of money to maintain warehouses. Sometimes the tooling and jigs are destroyed as part of a treaty - e.g. SR-71 and the titanium alloy tooling (I think that may have been SALT?) 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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